CONCEPT
Mechanical Objectivity
Daston and Galison's name for the mid-nineteenth-century epistemic ideal that identified reliable knowledge with the suppression of the self — achieved by building instruments that recorded without judging, with the photograph as paradigm.
Mechanical objectivity emerged in the 1840s as the dominant epistemic virtue of European science, displacing the truth-to-nature regime that had preceded it. Its founding premise was that human judgment was the primary source of distortion in the production of knowledge, and that the path to reliability ran through the systematic elimination of the observer's subjectivity. The photograph became the paradigmatic instrument of this ideal: the camera did not interpret, did not select, did not synthesize; it recorded through a causal process independent, in principle, of any human mind. The confidence that accompanied this regime was more absolute than that of truth-to-nature, because the grounds for trust had shifted from a human quality (expertise) to a mechanical property (causation). The machine could not have a bad day.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The paradox that Daston and Galison identified is that mechanical objectivity concealed human judgment rather than eliminating it. The photograph encoded interpretive choices at every stage: framing, angle,